Is Social Mobility a Myth?

Most people intuit that coming from the “right sort” of family is a big advantage in life, while being from the “wrong side of the tracks” is a serious disability. And they suspect that these advantages and disadvantages persist, as demonstrated by the continuing prominence of, say, people whose ancestors “came over on the Mayflower” among the upper crust in America.

The difficulty with this intuitive understanding is that social-science research does not seem to back it up. Psychologists, sociologists, and economists have found rates of social mobility that ought to wipe out all familial advantage or disadvantage within three to five generations. Furthermore, the rates of social mobility found in most of these studies differed greatly from one country to another, with, for instance, Sweden scoring much higher than the United States in this regard.

So is this belief in the persistence of familial advantage just a popular delusion? That is the question that U.C. Davis economist Gregory Clark takes up in his new book, and the answer he found surprised even him. He set out thinking the social-science consensus was correct, intending only to extend those findings further into the past. But the evidence changed his mind: social scientists have been measuring mobility the wrong way, and in fact the popular intuition is on target.

The key to understanding Clark’s thesis is his division of the factors that make for success in worldly affairs into an inherited component and a random component. (“Inherited” here need not mean “genetic”: one could inherit, for instance, one’s family’s reputation.) Most previous studies have focused on movements in social class from one generation to the next. But as Clark explains using his two-factor model, such a limited time frame means that the random component of social achievement is going to have an undue influence. This is not an esoteric notion: think, for instance, of a member of a high-achievement family who suffers a terrible car accident as a youth, leaving him with severe brain damage. It is quite likely that whether measured by income, profession, or educational level, that member will do significantly worse than the family average.

But this accident will not change the family’s basic “social competency” (Clark’s term). If the injured son has children, they will not inherit his brain damage. Their level of achievement will tend to return toward the family baseline. So, Clark suggests, if we really want to measure social mobility, we should look at the social status of families over many generations.

The way he and his team of researchers did so is ingenious: they found relatively rare surnames primarily associated with high social standing, such as the names taken by the nobility in Sweden, or low social standing, such as names characteristic of the Travellers in England, and tracked their appearance in historical records showing elite status, such as admissions to top universities—for Oxford and Cambridge, we have data dating back 800 years—large estates bequeathed in probate, or presence in high-status professions such as law and medicine.

The results confirm that the popular intuition has been correct all along:

The intergenerational correlation in all the societies for which we construct surname estimates—medieval England, modern England, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, and even egalitarian Sweden—is … much higher than conventionally estimated. Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.

What’s more, it matters little what social policies are put in place: Clark and his team find that social mobility remains nearly constant over time despite the arrival of free public education, the reduction of nepotism in government, modern economic growth, the expansion of the franchise, and redistributive taxation.

Clark introduces us to the reality of this persistence of status with a few notable examples. For instance, the family of famed diarist Samuel Pepys has had high social status from 1500 until today, while that of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, apparently has been upper crust since the Domesday Book of 1086. And in noting the many prominent members of the Darwin family, he remarks, “It is also interesting that Darwin’s fourth-generation descendants include Adrian Maynard Keynes and William Huxley Darwin.” The elite tend to marry the elite.

But if such isolated examples were the crux of Clark’s case, it would be a rather flimsy one: even if the standard social science take on mobility were correct, we would expect to find notable exceptions to the general rule. His main backing for his thesis is a number of studies conducted across many countries and many centuries. Nevertheless the anecdotes are an important aspect of this work: they are a component of how Clark continually turns what could have been an extremely dry executive summary of a number of demographic surveys into a consistently engaging book.

While I am no expert on the literature concerning social mobility, it seems to me that Clark has backed his thesis with very significant and relevant data. But I would want to see responses from those defending the more traditional social-science view on social mobility before unconditionally awarding the victory to Clark.

One way in which Clark gauges the social status of an ethnic group is to see how the proportion of doctors in the group compares to the proportion in the population as a whole. This measure is not flawless: in the case of Filipinos, I think it must overstate their status, as they seem to be a people that just love the medical professions. (Having married a Filipina, I have found that roughly 80 percent of my in-laws are doctors or nurses.) But it is a good rough gauge nonetheless. Clark uses this gauge to evaluate the elite status of various ethnic groups by looking at the surnames of registered physicians in America. Which ethnicities top the charts of U.S. doctors?

So, what do we find among the top 16 doctor-producing groups in the United States? No European Protestant group. This calls into question the notion of “white privilege”: being a physician is a high-income, high-status profession. If white privilege is a significant social force, why doesn’t a single European-Protestant ethnicity appear among this top 16? Why do our populations of black Africans and black Haitians produce doctors at significantly higher rates than Dutch-Americans, Swedish-Americans, or Finnish-Americans, all groups that make up a low enough percentage of our population that they cannot be said to constitute the average merely by their numerical preponderance? Clark does not try to deny that many white Americans harbor prejudice against non-whites. But this prejudice, however real, apparently is not preventing many non-white ethnic groups from achieving high social status.

And if white privilege is really a major force in the United States, what are we to make of the persistently low social status of French Canadian immigrants, a group of people that is, after all, pretty darned white, and many of whom have been in the States for a couple of centuries? (I had no idea this low social status was even the case before reading Clark’s book. Did you?) Clark explains this fact as being due to a double-selection for low social achievement: the initial population of French Canada came primarily from the lower-status population of France, and then it was chiefly lower-status Québecois who emigrated to America. Americans of French Canadian descent are in fact reverting to the mean and becoming more like the rest of our population; but starting from a very low initial position, they are doing so slowly, just as Clark’s model predicts.

Clark discusses several apparent exceptions to his “law of social mobility.” He finds they all fall into one of two categories. A group with exceptionally lengthy high or low social status may persist in that status because members do not intermarry with other groups, such as the Brahmins in India. Or the group in question may experience selective in- and out-migration, such as the Travellers in England—whom Clark argues are not ethnically distinct from the general population—so that lower-status people who want a migrant lifestyle joined the Travellers, while those wishing to move up in status left the group.

A flaw in this book is Clark’s tendency to treat the abstract model he has developed to capture his findings as if it were an actual causal agent operating in the real world. Consider the following passage:

If a group deviates in the current generation from the mean social status, set at zero, then on average will have deviated by a smaller amount, determined by b, in the previous generation. A group of families now of high social status have arrived at the status over many generations by a series of upward steps from the mean. And the length and speed of that ascent, paradoxically, are determined by the rate of persistence, b.

This is a perfect example of what Alfred North Whitehead referred to as “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In reality, what we have are particular, concrete individuals, members of families, doing this and that in the world and succeeding or failing to some degree or another. From a large number of such individuals, Clark has devised a model of changes in social status. Within that model, there is a parameter, which he calls b, that is determined by the average speed of ascent or descent in social status among family members.

It is these actual, concrete activities that make b what it is. But Clark gets this exactly backwards: for him, this abstract entity, b, is somehow controlling the actions of real-world individuals. It is like thinking that a baseball player’s batting average determines how often he will get hits, as if somehow a number on the TV screen can influence his swings, rather than how often he gets hits determining his batting average.

Enough with the details: what is the general upshot of Clark’s findings? For one thing, even if we believe that social mobility ought to be as high as possible, his data do not support the idea that we ought to undertake major social engineering projects with the goal of increasing it. If public education, a universal adult franchise, redistributive taxation, or even the radical egalitarianism of Mao’s China did not alter social mobility in any significant way, just what would we have to do to dramatically change it?

We might have to adopt the sort of dystopian measures that Kurt Vonnegut contemplated in his short story “Harrison Bergeron,” where people who are too intelligent are subjected to deafening noises that continually interrupt their thoughts. If that sort of thing is the only fix available, then perhaps we ought to accept social mobility for what it is and welcome the contributions to social life made by the more adept without seeking to cripple them with equal-outcome producing handicaps.

Clark notes that his findings do not indicate that we will have perpetual upper and lower classes: although social mobility for families is slower than others had estimated, it is real, and it means that over the centuries no particular clan will remain on top or at the bottom. In the meantime, Clark suggests a broad adoption of a Scandinavian-type social-welfare model: after all, if social status is largely a matter of being born into the right or wrong family, why shouldn’t public policy act to balance out such an effect of mere luck? Whether Clark is correct in drawing such a conclusion from his data, I leave it to my reader to decide. But if such issues concern you, you should read this important book.

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21 Responses to Is Social Mobility a Myth?

The use of surnames as a stand-in for actual family ties strikes me as very dubious. Right away it loses track of half the population (in many countries) since women change last names when they marry. Go back far enough and there’s confusion about spelling. And people changing names for reasons unrelated to marriage is not unknown either.

I have news for you: Being a doctor or professor today is a relatively low status position compared to being a hospital or academic administrator/owner.

What makes wealth perpetuate itself is easy access to capital. This allows someone to buy in bad times (“the bottom of the market”) and sell in good times when everyone else has some capital. As capitalism has become increasingly unstable in the last 50-years this is a marked advantage.

When it comes to physicians, aren’t a lot of those from India and Africa actually here on visas, and therefore come from outside the American population and social structure? They may also be more likely to be lower paid and less prevalent in the sort of specialized fields that doctors educated in the US tend to gravitate to; they may be physicians, but rank lower in the hierarchy among physicians.

Here’s my misinterpretation for the record. Let’s not forget that social status is about more than just money. Larry Flynt may have plenty of cash, but I doubt his social status is terribly high. His descendants may inherit his money, but I’d assume most people would just as soon not have to inherit his social status (e.g. “XZY Flynt, son or daughter of noted pornographer Larry Flynt, ….” is how you’ll be announced on the radio or any other media for your entire life. Not exactly what a person wants to have status wise is it?)

And then there’s the case of the impoverished aristocracy of Europe. Sure, lots of them have high status. They’re counts, dukes, barons, etc. etc. etc. They also don’t have two pennies to rub together as compared actually wealthy people. But, they’re still a Baron, and Canadians will give up their citizenship just to join the club (e.g. Lord Black of Crossharbour).

Social status is more than mere money. Money’s a part of it, and helps measure it kind of, but even in the most materially and economically deprived societies, there’s still a social pecking order and those at the top, as shown by this study, tend to stay there.

The average middle class person on the North American continent today has a material standard of living greater than that enjoyed by almost all of humanity throughout its entire history. They are rich beyond the dreams of almost all humans who ever lived. No one will remember any average middle class North American in 500 years. We’ll still know about Ceasar, Cleopatra and the kings, queens and emperors of old and the presidents, prime ministers and royalty of today. We’ll still know about Socrates and Shakespeare and a certain carpenter from Nazareth too (I’d add Mozart and John Williams too, because we know Mozart’s name has survived and I think John William’s work and name will probably be remembered too), which is some small saving grace, to the rest of us fair to middlin’ status folks (not that too many of us will found a religion spanning the globe or lasting millenia, but hey, there’s always Scientology right?), no much how much stuff we ever acquire and no matter how good we have it with delicacies from around the globe and dirt cheap and available emeralds, rubies and sapphires at which the ancients would marvel.

Okie Exile raises an excellent point. If Clark’s findings were based purely off a list of registered physicians without factoring out immigrants, it becomes a much less meaningful measurement.
That is especially true when dealing with ethnic groups that are such a small portion of the US population to begin with. The number he’s looking at there is a proportion. The smaller the group is, the larger impact on the proportion every false positive will have.
I also have to wonder just how well Clark’s model could really evaluate the impact of progressive social policies. He’s relying on a multi-generational model. Have there really been any countries that have implemented radical wealth redistribution policies, done so effectively, and sustained them long enough for his model to get an accurate read?

The Asians are now the highest earning American ethnic group and the Hispanics are now the lowest––both, incidentally, are hard-working and industrious, just in very different fields. White privilege and black discrimination still exist––whites have rights and opportunities that blacks don’t (to say it’s privilege is misleading, since obviously a higher social class has more rights and opportunities than a lower––we do live in a class society, after all)––but they’re not as interesting as the underachievers of the fourth or fifth generation of European immigrant families to the States (most professionals are now from much more recent immigrant families), or the exploitation of agricultural workers and day labor.

I fail to see how the persistence of certain “families,” or, as other posters have pointed out, certain family names (which leaves out matrilineal relations and descent, and also includes people who, for one reason or another, have “taken” those names, rather than being born or marrying into them), among the elite, even over eight centuries or more, disproves the notion of social mobility generally.

Yes, the very top elite, the aristocrats and royalty, manage, to some extent, and even with the advent of somewhat egalitarian institutions over the last one or perhaps, at most, two hundred years, to stay in the top brackets of wealth and status, that hardly means that other folks have not risen over those last one or two centuries as well.

“Nobles,” once upon a time, didn’t have to do anything to maintain their status. But with the advent of credentialism and the ending of automatic income from landed estates or the government, aristocratic families, quite naturally, took advantage of all their connections, all their wealth, all their savoir faire, to send their sons to the best primary, secondary, tertiary and graduate schools. And to tutor them as well. Thus, when it came time to choose a man to do such and such government job, or hold such and such rank in the army, or in the professions, etc, their boys were not only well connected, but were, objectively speaking, also well qualified.

Multiply that by a million, and that is what Clark has “discovered” (it actually seems rather obvious to me, the effect and what causes it, but whatever). It isn’t all about money and it doesn’t hold true for every individual. Such and such aristocrat can drink himself to death, and die broke. Buuut, by and large, his family will produce enough “winners” (and, remember, they are helped at becoming winners by their wealth, their connections, and so on) so that the family, as a whole, will continue to remain elite.

Even at the level of the merely “preppy” family in the USA, folks tend to marry their peers. And, since they went to prep school and Ivy League colleges and professional or other post graduate schools, they tend to push their kids (boys and girls in current society) to do the same. Little Hunter and Kaitlyn may be no smarter, objectively, than little Jack and Jill, but they have a head start over them in life.

No kidding, and what else is new?

Of course, because institutions are at least to some extent egalitarian these days, new “blood” does join the old elites at the top. And that is the real social mobility that we should be very wary of getting rid of merely because Clark has “found” that there is an intergenerational persistence of status.

As for French Canadians, besides the “double” emigrant effect noted above, it is also the case that these folks, with their “foreign” language and their “Popish” religion, happened to move into one of the more hidebound, tradition oriented, “old family” dominated regions of the USA (New England), and, at that, they moved not into the big city “melting pots” (like the Irish and Italians did in Boston, Providence, New Haven, Hartford, etc), but into little factory and mill towns. Places without much opportunity, particularly for those not only not of the “Founding” group, but so clearly different from them as well. Discriminated against and ghettoized, and forgotten, they tended to recreate their rural Quebec social structure in their new homes. Only relatively recently has any of that changed.

I’m a fan of both Gregory Clark and Prof. Callahan but have a hard time taking this topic seriously without either of them mentioning the elephant in the room; IQ.
I strongly suspect Prof. Clark knows better, especially given his past work. Any familiarity with IQ and much of the research on the topic and its relation to IQ would give a tremendous insight into the social mobility.

If Prof. Callahan’s believes that IQ is Illegitimate then he should at least mention so. Instead his only remark on the subject is this:
“(“Inherited” here need not mean “genetic”: one could inherit, for instance, one’s family’s reputation.)”

No mention of Francis Galton who invented both surname analysis as well as “regression to the mean” which Prof. Callahan does mention but not its relation to IQ from whence it came.

Furthermore, any talk of white privledge could be widely informed by bringing in IQ. Charles Murray did a follow up analysis in 1999 after the bruhaha of the Bell Curve. What he found was that if you equalized IQ then the income gap between black’s and white’s mostly vanished. In this sense the only white privledge is a higher mean IQ. The same was broadly true of male vs female income.
IQ is a fantastic predictive tool yet economists won’t go near it.

“When it comes to physicians, aren’t a lot of those from India and Africa actually here on visas, and therefore come from outside the American population and social structure?”

Most of them are educated at US medical schools and stay in the US. Their status isn’t lower as they have an equally prestigious (ie American) medical degree. Also many of them have children here who are American citizens in the same social ring as their parents with the privileges that go along with it. Anecdotally I know 4 people in medical school whose parents came here to get a medical degree and stayed while I know only one of European decent whose parents were Amercian. If those 4 first generation Americans 2 have siblings also aspiring for medical/professional degrees.

Re: . Larry Flynt may have plenty of cash, but I doubt his social status is terribly high.

With time his descendants could become quite respectable. Even in highly structured class systems time washes away the taint of ignobility if a family has staying power over the generations. The de la Poles started out as money lenders (almost as bad as being a pornographer today in medieval eyes) who bailed out Edward III and got a barony for it. A century later their heirs were fit to marry into the royal family and they even made an unsuccessful tempt on the throne itself, contesting with Henry Tudor who also had risen up from less exalted, and somewhat scandalous, ancestry.

Test of social mobility is how really poor do. How have African Americans done and poor Latinos?

I have a friend in NY who say his working class family has found it it really hard. He is a rare member who has m moved up.

When you look at immigrants you have to first understand what class they were in their home country. That is your hint of how they will do in their adopted country.Latinos who weren’t poor have not had the problem their poor compatriots have had.

I think you cannot really compare US/Canada/Australia to countries that were already fully settled overtime. Their situation made social mobility easier. Of course if you already come from a well off background you know how to do well for yourself;and I think that is why there were ties between European and Americans of well off European background. Maybe America now is becoming more like what settled places were like. That holds true with immigrants from other countries as well.

Interesting topic, wish I’d read the piece earlier. I share JonF’s skepticism about last names being used. To add to his point about half the offspring changing their names with marriage, we’d end up with far less than that ultimately. That is, prominent men unusual surnames will likely end up with half their offspring as sons, half as daughters, on average. The daughters’ families will be named after their sons-in-law, of course; but the sons will also see half their children taking another man’s name. This will make the proportion of grandchildren bearing the patriarch’s name one-fourth. The great-grandchildren would just one-eighth, the great-greats one-sixteenth, and so forth. You’d likely end up with very small samples, possibly too tiny to be statistically valid. If, OTOH, Clark and his researcher(s) were so diligent that they looked up old birth records to track these inheritances, the family tree might cover too many to be useful. Not much is to be learned from a “sampling” that includes nearly everyone.

I wonder too if the very fact that the surnames were uncommon may have given them a certain cachet when the famous man was well-known, at least on a local level. For instance, take the world of English literature. How many of you have known a Chaucer or Shakespeare, or Coleridge or Keats? I don’t believe I’ve ever known anyone with one of those last names, but I believe I’d be rather impressed if I had, and would have wondered about any kinship with the famous author. I’d be far less likely to think that a Johnson was related to Dr. Samuel, and would be very unlikely to ask. This might give many unusual names an advantage that more common ones might not, in terms of giving the individual bearing one of the former something to live up to.

Finally, on the subject of the top 16 ethnicities in terms of producing MDs: many of these appear to be largely self-selected. For instance, are black Africans that much more ambitious and intelligent than the population at large? Or are the more ambitious and intelligent of their population more likely to come to these shores? I’m more inclined to go with the latter explanation, and the same may well apply to other groups. Btw, I looked up Copts on Wikipedia, and estimates of their numbers in the US vary from 200 thousand all the way up to 1 million. Presumably the lowest figure was used for calculating their relative proportion of MDs, but if those saying many more are right, that would change things rather drastically.

“The use of surnames as a stand-in for actual family ties strikes me as very dubious. Right away it loses track of half the population (in many countries) since women change last names when they marry.”

The author acknowledges this.

“Go back far enough and there’s confusion about spelling. And people changing names for reasons unrelated to marriage is not unknown either.”

All handled. These are professional researchers: they know how to deal with data.

African and Asian immigrants to the United States are a pretty self-selecting group. They tend to be wealthier and better educated than the average person in their home countries. Any comparison between them and native-born Americans must take that into account.

Re: Larry Flynt may have plenty of cash, but I doubt his social status is terribly high.
On the other hand, look at the descendants of Joseph Kennedy, a part time bootlegger if I’m not mistaken. More generally, the expression “every great fortune begins with a great crime” seems to point to the efficacy of money in washing clean a soiled background.

I think we do inherit class. I was born very poor, with all the “drama” that this brings, you know, bad parenting, etc. I was straight A, very bright, went on to college, got a degree in Computer Science, and here I am barely making it in poverty. People don’t just give jobs for degrees, most jobs are gotten through people you know and they’re willing to teach you on the job. Well nobody is going to teach me anything. College teaches nothing the real world uses.

My cousins they were always flunking, always playing video games, doing nothing and they live in a 3rd world country and yet are doing better than me. You might say we are the same family, yes and no, because my aunt married someone with money. So they’re inheriting his class. On the other hand my mom married someone with less money than her. That was her fault of course, but my point is that no matter how I’ve done everything right, I’m cursed by this inheritance.

People like to think they all did it on their own work, because it makes them feel better, or because they’re already born into privilege and don’t really know what it means to not be born into it.